Family Law Commons^™

Predicting Less, Understanding More: Shifting The Use Of Machine Learning From Individual Prediction To Structural Insights In Systems That Affect Children And Families, Amanda J. Fairchild, Joshua Gupta-Kagan, Andrew Barclay

Faculty Scholarship

Machine learning algorithms have been deeply embedded across domains, valued for their capacity to analyze large-scale data and to support a range of descriptive and predictive tasks. Despite their versatility, most applications to date have focused on individual-level prediction at the expense of broader structural insights. This paper shifts that focus by using comprehensive demographic, juvenile justice, and other key data from child-serving agencies in one southern state to examine how juvenile and family court intake structures shape case outcomes in delinquency referrals. Specifically, we combine machine learning algorithms with a doubly robust, potential outcomes-based modeling procedure to estimate the …

The Co-Parent Trap, Daniel F. Bousquet

Brooklyn Law Review

At the same time, a more dynamic method for identifying and protecting unenumerated rights has lacked a normative foundation. That gap has left rights such as same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and abortion open to the charge that the Court protected them based only on individual justices’ morality. This charge is false. Doctrinally, dynamic due process is constrained by equal protection principles and triggers only rigorous rational basis review. This modest standard leaves majorities free to pursue nearly any interest besides morality standing alone or what courts have called animus.

The Impact Of Ai Companions On Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

People of all ages and backgrounds regularly use AI companions — virtual friends, lovers, and confidantes powered by artificial intelligence. As a new form of relationship, this development poses novel doctrinal and policy questions for family law. As a doctrinal matter, what does child neglect look like when a parent delegates caretaking to an AI companion? How should standards for elder neglect adapt to the widespread use of robotic caregivers? Should lawmakers impose mandatory reporting requirements on therapy bots if children share experiences of abuse or neglect? And can people designate an AI companion as a health care proxy? As …

Void, Voidable, And The Limits Of Finality: Reconciling Equity And Public Policy In Illinois Child Support Orders, Julie M. Pirtle

Northern Illinois University Law Review

What happens when a 2012 agreed order, which dismisses a 2009 paternity finding, waives child support, and sets no parenting time, is challenged as void twelve years later and now Mother says Father has a $63,219.60 arrearage? My client, the Father and payor of support, was facing just that scenario. It is common knowledge that an out of court agreement to modify/terminate child support is not enforceable unless it is reduced to writing and approved by the courts. However, a party to a litigation should be allowed to rely on the orders the court enters. Father has every right to …

Appellate Review Of Child Custody In Mississippi, 1994-2024, Eleanor Detweiler

Honors Theses

This study examines changes in child custody decision-making within the Mississippi appellate court system over a thirty-year period, with a particular focus on the role of legal custody as a separate consideration from physical custody. Using a longitudinal empirical research design, appellate court decisions from 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2024 were analyzed using Nexis Uni. Cases were identified using the search term “child custody” with emphasis on case headnotes indexed under “child custody” as the area of law. Variables including party roles, types of custody sought, reasons for appeal, and case outcomes were recorded and evaluated to identify trends over …

“You Can’T Post That!”: Constitutionality Of Non-Disparagement Orders Barring Divorced Parents’ Social Media Posts, Kaitlyn B. Hammond

Vanderbilt Law Review

When a marriage goes wrong, a court may use a non-disparagement order to prevent a party from speaking negatively about another in some way, either permanently or temporarily. Family courts often use non-disparagement orders to protect parties or their children from psychological harm during divorce or child-custody proceedings. In such cases, non-disparagement orders forbid parents from denigrating one another in front of their children and/or third parties. To protect the child, non-disparagement orders are often imposed upon both parents by the court. But courts do not always protect children and other parties from disparagement in this way. Although non-disparagement orders …

Law And The (Re)Production Of Class Hierarchies In Egypt, Ahmad Abdelnaby

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how Egypt’s legal system, structurally tilted toward the elite and constitutive of inequality, has interacted with the country’s entrenched culture of class-based discrimination to produce a legal culture uniquely comfortable with hierarchy. It contends that class-based discrimination in Egypt has evolved from a social prejudice into a juridical condition, one in which the law does not merely mirror inequality but actively constructs and rationalizes it. By examining the intersection between legal structure and Egypt’s entrenched moral order of class-based discrimination, the study reveals a legal culture that no longer hides its hierarchies behind the veil of neutrality …

Keeping Children Safe: Bring Kayden's Law To Ohio, Christina Woods-Tsiperson

Akron Law Review

After decades of punishing murder-suicide headlines, a growing body of evidence now corroborates what female domestic violence survivors have said for years: that family courts deciding child custody cases disproportionately reject mothers’ allegations of domestic violence and paternal child abuse. From prominent legal scholars to local family law attorneys (and increasingly, investigative reporters), many modern voices contend that mothers specifically face a litany of obstacles in court, including heightened judicial suspicion that they are “parental alienators,” a widespread minimization of coercive control, and state legal standards that  emphasize shared parenting over child safety.

Following the widely publicized murder of seven-year-old …

Before Meyer And Pierce, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

In the standard story taught in typical Parents, Children, and the State or Children & the Law courses, analysis of parental rights has a clear beginning. In 1923, at the height of the Lochner era, in Meyer v. Nebraska, a case of first impression, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “[w]ithout doubt” the Due Process Clause protected the right “to marry [and] establish a home and bring up children.” Two years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court recognized “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” …

Ai Companions And The Lessons Of Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Virtual friends and lovers powered by artificial intelligence are rapidly moving to the center of our emotional and social lives. Millions of people turn to AI companions every day for conversation, romance, sexual intimacy, therapy, and education. AI companionship holds promise, potentially reducing loneliness, supporting people without access to mental health treatment, helping students learn, and offering a judgment-free space for sensitive conversations. But AI companionship also raises significant concerns. The technology's addictiveness may exacerbate loneliness and can undermine human relationships. Therapy bots may prove more harmful than helpful. AI companions can be emotionally abusive. And their access to the …

Benchmarking Age-Gates, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how legal actors—particularly legislators, judges, and attorneys—invoke chronological age to justify the application of legal rules to adolescents. In doing so, they often rely on comparisons to existing “age-gates,” treating these thresholds (such as ages 18 or 21) as self-justifying reference points. Age 18, marking the legal transition from childhood to adulthood, and age 21, the former age of majority and current sales age for certain controlled substances, serve as especially powerful rhetorical anchors in age-based legal reasoning. These anchor points shape how legal actors advocate for or against particular age thresholds, often substituting analogy for substantive …

The 100-Year Life And The New Family Law, Naomi Cahn, Clare Huntington, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reflects on the future of family law in an era of longer lives. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the 100-year life is indeed likely to have an impact on the nature, scope, and definition of family law, but that families will continue to function as the primary setting for intimacy and for caregiving and caretaking, whatever form those families take. Further, the importance to both individual and social welfare of family support throughout life points to a need for reform of current family law doctrine. The impact of longer life on doctrines regulating the relationship of …

The Illusion Of Stability In Family Law, Kaiponanea T. Matsumura

Vanderbilt Law Review

Stability is universally accepted as a central value in family law. Within the context of adult relationships, stability determines which relationships the law will recognize and support. Within the context of parent child relationships, stability determines who will be recognized as a parent, whose parental rights will be terminated by the state, and who, among fit parents, will receive custody. This Article challenges stability’s pride of place in family law, identifying three problems with the law’s use of stability.

First, stability is often used in a circular way. Lawmakers treat stability as a requirement—a trait to which the law responds—even …

Mainstreaming Parafamily, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

In Parafamily, Chen and Mulligan have managed to cover vast terrain, to catalogue important developments in law, to canvass insights from generations of thinkers, and to propose an ambitious yet pragmatic approach to the laws that govern human relationships, directly and indirectly. They do all this in a relatively short article composed of unusually readable prose. Quite a feat.

The focus of the piece is Chen and Mulligan’s contribution to the field of legal scholarship dedicated to relationships that go beyond the traditional nuclear family. As their title reveals, the authors contribute a new term and concept to this …

Safer Futures: Strategies For Enhancing Collaboration Between Law Enforcement And Child Welfare Agencies In Preventing Fatal Child Abuse, Kayla M. Brown

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Best Interest Of The Child, Victoria Mather

Faculty Articles

One of the basic tenets of Family Law as applied to children is consideration of "best interest of the child" in making decisions. Standards for custody, termination, adoption, and all other matters affecting children are overlaid with consideration of best interest. Unfortunately, the promise of best interest is lost in the actual mechanics of making these critical decisions involving children. This Article explores the disconnect between the ideal of using the best interest of the child as a key factor in legal decisions affecting children and the practicalities of competing interests. The Article first explores the common concern of the …

Lost Fatherhood: Including Fathers In The Post-Dobbs Abortion Debate, Linda L. Schlueter

Faculty Articles

Scientific studies over the last five decades show the negative impact an abortion can have on the men who fathered the aborted children. These studies demonstrate that those men-even if they supported the woman's decision to have an abortion-can experience a variety of psychological problems including depression, anger, hopelessness, helplessness, broken or damaged relationships, feelings of emasculation, and loneliness. Despite these compelling studies, little or no real attention is given to involving men in the legal debate regarding abortion. The abortion debate presents a legal Rubik's Cube of thorny issues that can affect the mother, the father, and the unborn …

Leaving Pawprints On Our Hearts: Bystander Recovery For Witnessing The Negligent Killing Of A Companion Animal, John G. Browning

Animal Law Review

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly all (97%) Americans with companion animals consider their “furbabies” to be members of the family. This is reflected in a number of other areas, from state and federal laws re-garding emergency management that recognize four-legged members of the family unit to divorce and custody laws in multiple states that require courts to treat companion animals not as property, but as family members. Soci-ologists and psychologists have also documented the expanding recognition of the “multispecies family.” However, the majority of states’ laws still view companion animals as chattel property, even as more and more …

Property Problems In The New Non-Marriage: Inheritance, Eliot Tracz

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Marriage equality has been a hotly contested topic for many years, in both the court of public opinion and in courts of law. Major Supreme Court cases have found that marriage is a fundamental right, yet issues such as marriage outside of one’s race or to a person of the same gender have still been topics of litigation. At times, the very definition of marriage has been at issue, but throughout all of this litigation, courts have consistently defined marriage as a relationship between two people.

The Racial History Of Marital Privilege, Jessica Dixon Weaver

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law unearths forgotten racial and political battles centered on establishing equal benefits and opportunities for unmarried parents and couples. It is the first book that grapples with the racial motivations of the late twentieth-century United States government withdrawal or manipulation of a host of laws that center the normative White, married, heterosexual couple. Marital Privilege emphasizes how both federal and state governments marginalize poor people to limited spaces within a weak economic safety net, often leaving families at the intersection of poverty and race unable to take advantage of …

Contesting And Controlling Abortion In China’S Courts, Molly Bodurtha, Benjamin L. Liebman, Li Chenquian, Xiaohan Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has brought renewed global attention to how legal systems protect and restrict women’s reproductive autonomy. Central themes have included how the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States coincides with the judiciary’s embrace of a broader “jurisprudence of masculinity” and the relationship between abortion restrictions and authoritarianism, as multiple countries have enacted restrictive measures while undergoing democratic backsliding.

Yet, the scholarly conversation on abortion, democracy, and how courts reflect and entrench gender disparities entirely omits China — the largest authoritarian state and a country …

Friends With Social Benefits: Queerplatonic Relationships And The Future Of Marriage

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Three-Dimensional Chess For Parents Facing A Child Protective Services Investigation: Navigating The Child Welfare Exception To The Constitution, Gregory M. Varner

Pace Law Review

This article examines the intricate dynamics faced by parents dur-

ing a child protective services (CPS) investigation, highlighting the complexities of navigating the child welfare system within the framework of constitutional exceptions. It outlines the unique challenges parents en- counter, including legal rights, procedural requirements, and the emotional toll of being under investigation. By analyzing relevant legal standards and the roles of various stakeholders, the article provides essential guidance for parents on how to effectively engage with CPS while protecting their family’s interests. Emphasizing the importance of in- formed advocacy, the article aims to equip parents with the knowledge and …

Fatherhood, Family Law, And The Crisis Of Boys And Men, June Carbone, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Boys and men in all racial and ethnic groups and across most socioeconomic groups are struggling on many fronts, including education, employment, physical and mental health, and social integration. In these areas and more, boys and men are much worse off than they were only a few decades ago. The crisis — which is concentrated among men without college degrees — is rooted in large-scale structural changes to the economy that have decimated jobs for this group and policy choices that emphasize incarceration while doing little to address economic inequality.

The decline in male well-being is not just a problem …

Kindly Remove My Child From The Bubble Wrap - Analyzing Childress V. Madison County And Why Tennessee Courts Should Enforce Parental Pre-Injury Liability Concerns, Joshua D. Arters, Ben M. Rose

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

“I overstepped my parental boundaries at the Aiguille Rock Climbing Center . . . . I signed a waiver absolving it of blame if my daughter pulled a Humpty Dumpty from the top of a wall. The Florida Supreme Court recently ruled I didn't have that right. I can make all kinds of decisions for my girl, including life-and-death calls on medical care. But I can’t judge the risk she will take scaling a 20-foot wall and decide it is so miniscule that I’m willing to sign a waiver so she can do it—not even if I’m holding the safety …

Is Parenting Authority A Usurpation Of Judicial Authority? Harmonizing Authority For, Benefits Of, And Limitations On This Legal-Psychological Hybrid, Joi T. Montiel

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

A “Parenting Coordinator” assists high-conflict parents in resolving disputes that arise in the parents’ efforts to jointly parent their children after a divorce. The Parenting Coordinator simultaneously educates the parents so as to minimize the degree and frequency of future conflict. While Parenting Coordination is not mediation or arbitration, it is also not counseling. Instead, Parenting Coordination is a “legal-psychological hybrid.” A trial court’s delegation to one in this hybrid role the power to determine a fit parent’s access to her child is arguably an improper delegation of judicial authority. While thirteen states have comprehensive schemes setting out their Parenting …

Panel Discussion 4: Best Practices In Representing Children In Court, Timothy Irwin, Carlton Lewis, Dwight Stokes

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

An Impossible Burden: A Comment Supporting Revision Of Wisconsin’S Parenthood As A Result Of Sexual Assault Statute, Gabriella Humblet

Marquette Law Review

The Wisconsin statute that regulates termination of parental rights (TPR) as a result of sexual assault is untenable and in need of revision. The current statute is far too stringent to be practically implemented, which is especially true in involuntary TPR proceedings.

This Comment seeks to explain why Wisconsin’s current statute for TPR as a result of sexual assault is flawed. First, this Comment gives background by detailing rape statistics in the United States to explain why the possibility for TPR exists when a conception results from a sexual assault. Second, Wisconsin adopts a position that is at odds with …

Pro-Natalism In Probate Law, Diane Kemker

American University Law Review

“Pro-natalism” is a term that has been variously used to describe any and all government policies that favor birth, babies, children, families, and population growth, as well as more focused laws that incentivize childbirth; burden, ban, or criminalize abortion and/or contraception; and otherwise disfavor the childless. Whether and to what extent U.S. law is or should be pro-natalist is central to current and ongoing debates about reproductive rights and the deeply vexed question of when life begins. A robust legal feminist literature has aimed to identify and critique pro-natalist law and policy, particularly in forms that constrain the autonomy of …

Bibliography Of Family Law Publications Of The Pennsylvania Bar Institute (1971-2023), Joel Fishman

Law Faculty Publications

As practicing members of the bench and bar, readers of this article know of the publications of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute (PBI) that began in 1968 to published Continuing Legal Education programs. The following is a listing of the family-law CLE publications from 1971 through 2023. The listing is partly drawn from a short-title printed list of PBI publications listed chronologically from 1968 to 1998 (1-2192) that the author obtained many years ago and now number over 11,000 publications. Not every title can be found in the law library catalogs and so some titles are listed according to the titles …